It's probably character forming to accept I will never know

[james_davis_nicoll]

OHIP does not cover testing adults to see if they are somewhere on the autism spectrum if the motivation is idle curiosity. The tests cost up to $1500.00. I am a bit curious but nowhere near $1500.00 curious, particularly since it's unlikely the information would have real world applications for me.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

It might if you are, or have been, misdiagnosed with something else (or its absence). I was not diagnosed until my 40s, and it made a difference in tactics for managing stress, anxiety, and depression. But I was lucky enough to get a good, knowledgeable specialist, which made a big difference.

Riderius

[ffutures]

According to the "are you autistic?" online survey you linked to I am very autistic - but I really doubt its accuracy. It seemed to interpret "not very invested in either end of the scale" as autism.

[the_siobhan]

It's the same with ADHD, even if the motivation is one's employ-ability. Apparently if you've managed to make it to adulthood without diagnosis, you can just continue to muddle along your own damn self.

[elusis]

University psychology department's clinic, perhaps?

[beatrice_otter]

I don't know about ADD/ADHD, but my experience (and the experience of most other spectrumites that I know) is that trained professionals are generally less help for autism issues than going to other people on the spectrum and asking how they handle whatever the issue is.

Other things, now, professionals can be very helpful with. 70% of autistics have at least one other diagnosed condition, the most common being anxiety. I have anxiety and my year of counseling helped with that a lot. Did nothing to help me cope with my autism, except insofar as managing my anxiety better gave me more resources to handle my autism symptoms. But it did help with the anxiety.

Nicoll Events as confounding factors

[kathmandu]

I suspect there are too many confounding factors for you to get a reliable answer anyway. What with your medical history of Nicoll Events involving brain trauma, you have other reasons for displaying a lot of things on the checklist.

[beatrice_otter]

$1500? That is RIDICULOUS. When I got my autism* diagnosis in 2008 (needed it for grad school) I searched for psychologists in my area who specialized in autism, picked one, had a three-hour appointment that cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $300, and a week later got the formal diagnosis paperwork in the mail.

(This was before the DSM-V came out, which basically merged "Aspergers" and "Autism" for classification purposes, so I got diagnosed with Aspergers, but that is no longer a clinical definition in use. The difference between the two diagnoses was whether you had been language delayed as a child; verbal language processing delay can tell you about someone's communications issues but not about any of the other myriad symptoms of the autism spectrum, so they stopped focusing on it.)